John Mark Brown- A Poem

Bio: John Mark Brown is a Southern Illinois native, a senior Creative Writing student at Eastern Illinois University, and a cardigan enthusiast. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, and Indiana Voice Journal.

Hide and Seek
San Francisco, 1976

Saturday strolls once
brought me to Haight—
silty smudge on crystal bay.

There they traipsed—sordid
soldiers for Stonewall—
tilt brows to me as if they knew.

Show their teeth to turmoil they brew,
march through streets in chapel’s view,
fist in fist as a method to prove

they are Present.
       They are Parked.               
                They are Proud.

Proud to trample divine design.
Proud to swallow community cause.
Proud to anagram fathers’ fair names.

Display disease, perform perverse.
I evade the Castro zoo:
hospice of my filth.